Methuen Five Find-Outers cloth boards

[Gavin]

Just a quickie - did the first editions of Five Find-Outers have blue or red cloth boards?

Side note - I think it would be really nice (and a mountain of work!) if more info was added to the Book Listing page of this site containing information on different editions of books (publishing date, notable characteristics of each edition, covers etc). It could be contributed to by everyone?

[Tony Summerfield]

A quickie answer, Gavin, would be no! The cloth boards to the Find-Outers 1st editions came in a wide variety of colours. There is actually no problem at all in identifying the 1st edition books, it is normally the dustwrappers that are the problem, in case at some stage they have been swapped for a later edition wrapper.

My illustrated bibliographies go into enormous detail to help identify 1st editions, but we couldn't possibly go into this sort of detail on the Book Listing on the website, which is really just intended as a rough guide to the books. I hope you enjoy looking at the different covers and the internal illustrations anyway and slightly belatedly, welcome to the Society.

[Gavin]

Thanks Tony and thanks for the Journal which arrived really quickly - looking forward to having a good read through it.

I didn't know the cloth boards were of various colours - I assumed they were all the one colour and perhaps a later edition changed to a different colour. Thanks for that.

[Lenoir]

Seeing that most of mine don’t have jackets, I can tell at a glance that Burnt Cottage is green, the next few are red, Missing Necklace is a sort of beige, Hidden House is grey, Strange Bundle is yellow, and Banshee dark blue. (Well, my versions are anyway).
And tally ho is blue (under its DJ!).

[Tony Summerfield]

I'll give you the first six, Gavin:-

Powder blue
Pale green
Dark red
Olive green
Cream
Bright orange

Quite a mixture as you can see!

[Daisy]

It looks as though the colour was changed from edition to edition then? Samazing!

[Gavin]

Thanks for the list Tony.

It looks as though the colour was changed from edition to edition then? Samazing!

Yep, this is what I'm wondering Daisy - my question is, did they do a whole set of the same colour for each edition? (I guess this might not have been possible for the earliest editions because the other books hadn't been written yet!)

[Daisy]

This looks like an interesting investigation for some keen find-outer! I assume Tony's list contains only first editions? My first six are :- Green - 1959, Red - 1950, Red 1945(Ist), Orange 1950, Cream, (now dirty beige!) 1949, Pale blue - 1953. These were all reprinted so many times maybe the publishers just used the colour nearest to hand!